What does it all mean?
CODCAST E4 What does it all mean
SPEAKERS
narrator, Kelsie Murchy, John Last, Amalis Reira, The Silent World narrator, Ben Laurel, Rodney Rountree
John Last 00:04
I'm John last this is the Codcast, and we've arrived at our final destination. This is our last episode, and today we're going to look at what exactly all this research that we've been talking about means for the future of Arctic cod. But before we get into all of that, let's look back on what we've learned.
narrator 00:25
Are you sitting comfortably? Good? Then we'll begin
John Last 00:32
First we, or at least I, learned that fish can make noise, and not just one noise, but dozens of different sounds, chattering teeth, drumming, bladders, even tendons plucked like string guitars. We probably know only a fraction of the sounds they can produce, and we've studied an even smaller fraction of the species that make them
Rodney Rountree 00:56
we know of the 30,000 or so fish species, we've only actually looked at a few percentage of those for sand production. Still, it's a drop in the bucket.
John Last 01:09
And just like us humans, fish make these noises for all kinds of reasons, from warning a friend about a predator to setting the mood for romance. So forgive me for saying so, but Jacques Cousteau was a dirty liar,
The Silent World narrator 01:34
a mysterious realm, the silent world.
John Last 01:38
The silent world doesn't exist. Stick your head beneath the waves, or at least a powerful microphone, and the deep blue sea sounds less like this.. than this... [Under the Sea music] the sooner we come to realize that, the sooner we'll treat these noises with respect, protecting fish from all the noise that we make, from puttering engines to sonic booms. So let's now bring this all back to our friend the Arctic cod. Do you see now? Why Amalis Riera, the researcher from our very first episode, why she was so excited to record this little sound? I mean, first of all, there's the sheer discovery. We never knew that arctic cod made sounds. She didn't need a billion dollars to make a new discovery. She just put a little old hydrophone in a fish tank and voila. But there's more, much more you understanding the sound and why Arctic cod make it is key to understanding what they do as a species and when, and understanding that may be key to protecting them from human harm, a keystone species on which so much of Arctic life depends. Today on the podcast, we're going to look at how this research started by Ammalis is building towards that future and what work remains to be done. Let's start right at the beginning. We're in the Arctic Ocean now it's a little chilly, I must say, and in front of us is a large school of Arctic cod swimming to and fro. Oh, look over there, a straggler. This little guy is still pretty young. Then, Little does he know it, but his world is about to change big time, All of us. A sudden, he's scooped aboard a boat, stuffed into a bag, and taken to Oregon, more than 4000 kilometers away.
Ben Laurel 04:13
Getting the fish alive from the Arctic is the first challenge. We can't generally ship big fish, so we have to use smaller juvenile fish.
John Last 04:24
This is Ben Laurel, he is one of the Arctic cod research project's guys on the ground. He's abducted fish from Arctic waters a few times. Now, you see, when the project started, the group needed one thing fast, Arctic cod, but getting them from the remote Arctic Ocean all the way to NOAA's lab in Oregon was anything but easy.
Ben Laurel 04:45
That was our first go at it. And you know, there's not a lot of assets in the Arctic, you know, we don't, you know, there's not routine surveys, just even having any infrastructure to work from. Even, like the building space and this sort of thing, close, you know, like protected structures to, sort of, you know, get out of the elements and that sort of thing. It's all hard. Yeah, it has to be pretty quick. We usually have about 24 to 36 hours. And sort of whatever, you know, everything's a little bit delicate and stressful. When you're know you're collecting the fish. You have to hold them in the field and then make sure that the plane is ready to go and this sort of thing. It's a lot of logistics. Originally, I think our first collection was only 30 fish, and then we brought back in our second collection, the following year, about 120 fish. It is a remarkable thing. It doesn't seem right that you can put a fish from the Arctic basically on air cargo on Alaska Airlines, and that fish can show up in Newport, Oregon alive,
At NOAA these fish arrived into a purpose built suite designed to feel just like home, vast temperature controlled tanks that mimic particular seasons in the Arctic waters.
Ben Laurel 06:03
You know, we have to use a lot of energy to sort of chill water, and that's and we have to have pretty unique systems to actually do that at kind of a large scale, sort of to just to hold the animals in their sort of natural environment. And then when we get into that experimental phase, we need some precise controls to sort of fine tune that and make sure that, you know, we're holding our treatment groups under those, those sort of control conditions, and so that we're not introducing other artifacts into our experiments.
John Last 06:31
Now it was time for the real research to begin to decode the language of Arctic cod. First, researchers needed to record their sounds, a lot of them, a lot more, at least, than the one or two grunts Amalis was able to record. That means often catching these fish unawares on camera too, so that you can see exactly what has motivated their little fishy grunts. Now, if you've listened to our past episodes, you know where this is going.
Ben Laurel 06:57
Essentially, what's going on is that there are hydrophones we're listening to the fish producing sounds under a different sort of, you know, condition. So we have some fish that are just males and some females. So there's hydrophone and each of those individual tanks, and then we have a larger tank where we have our brood stock population that are allowed to spawn. And, you know, there's hydrophones there, there's video that's been that also goes along with the hydrophones listening so there's visual
John Last 07:33
Ever since those juvenile fish were snatched from the Arctic, more than a year ago, Ben and his team have been putting them under near continuous surveillance, recording every squeak, Crackle and grunt, mimicking seasonal changes in temperature and light conditions. These scientists are even able to keep these fish on their natural schedule, recording changes in behavior and crucially, sound production during mating season and deep winter. So with so much data now at their fingertips, What exactly have they found out?
Ben Laurel 08:12
So there's a lot of data being generated, and the processing is always takes longer, and so it's, it's always a lag. So we learned a couple, you know, significant findings. One is that they do produce sound. I think we've established that, and it's a little preliminary now, but it does seem to be there's some seasonality to that sound production.
John Last 08:36
Now, I know what you may be thinking, that's it. We knew they produced sound already, right? That's really all we can say. To that I say, oh, ye of little faith. This is science we're talking about. And real science takes time. And when it comes to Arctic cod noises, the work has only just begun.
Kelsie Murchy 08:57
You know, we're still so new into the data science.
John Last 08:59
This is Kelsey Murchie, she's a PhD researcher with the project. In fact,
Kelsie Murchy 09:04
I just recently finished my PhD at the end of last term.
John Last 09:08
Oh Wow, congratulations.
Kelsie Murchy 09:10
I think it's Finland or Norway, they you get a sword. I keep being like, I don't want to get a sword. Like, have a sword now.
John Last 09:18
You could get a sword fish. Probably, that might be more appropriate.
Kelsie Murchy 09:21
Ooh, that would be fun.
John Last 09:23
Kelsey's expertise is no joke. But for a while, her job on the project was very simple. Listen back to hours and hours of tank recordings and mark anything that seemed like it could be a cod grunt.
Kelsie Murchy 09:36
You're just like sitting at a computer, like staring at spectrograms all day, every day, you know, like listening to sounds, and the tank recordings are quite noisy, which is kind of just a given for tanks. There's, you know, pumps and background noise and electrical noise and all these things that we pick up. And so it can be quite loud, and the grunts aren't super loud themselves. So I had to stop, because it was like giving myself a headache.
John Last 10:00
Fortunately for Kelsey, she didn't have to do it forever, because what Kelsey was doing all those long hours in front of a computer was training a highly advanced piece of tech, a kind of job killing robot, if you will, that will someday save her and her fellow researchers hundreds of hours of time an AI assisted cod grunt auto detector.
Kelsie Murchy 10:28
Yeah, that's kind of the goal is that we could, you know, obviously, then use it on on our data, to go through a lot of data that we would not be able to get through manually, especially in its entirety. So, like, even what we've been doing manually, we've been only doing like, you know, five minutes every half hour, whereas, like with the auto detector, we could feed in, you know, all of the data and basically get it down to every audio file is being processed. Versus, like, we couldn't do that manually without an entire army of people,
John Last 11:05
With the help of a whale research group called Deep Voice, the Arctic cod research team hopes that this auto detector will be up and running very soon, working on more than two years of recording data they've already collected. This won't just save time. It will also help unlock the answers to all the big and small questions about when and why these fish make their sounds.
Kelsie Murchy 11:29
Is it, you know, one fish produces a sound and like as it's chasing a fish away, or is it just doing it more as like a attraction for like females? So we have some fish that will produce like a mate attraction call. We have them separated into two tanks where there was males only, as in female only to see, you know, is it only males that are producing some of these sounds? Are they produced only during spawning? Are the sounds they producing similar? Are we able to look at differences in, you know, their duration or kind of frequency composition, we can kind of, then start to look at recordings that have been taken in the wild. That's kind of, I think one big goal is to be able to use some of these for future research from collections that are out in the Arctic, and see where, maybe where we can identify where some species are living that maybe we didn't know, or look at distribution and things like that.
John Last 12:26
These questions may sound mundane to non experts, but their answers could have major consequences for the protection of a vulnerable species. Let's hear from Amalis Reira again, a reminder, she's the researcher who kicked off this whole project with her first quiet, little recording of an Arctic cod grunt.
Amalis Reira 12:43
The Arctic cod is quite an important species in its Arctic ecosystem. It's a forage fish species. It is the prey for many other higher troffic level animals that depend on them for food, and because of climate change and rising ocean temperatures, they are being displaced. Their populations are decreasing. It's becoming to the point of a crisis, because it's having effects on other species that rely on them for food sources.
John Last 13:27
Kelsey Murchie, again,
Kelsie Murchy 13:28
you know, any species that's, you know, having a hard time, and also with, you know, climate change and warming waters. I don't know their, you know, tolerance levels for things, but I would think kind of giving an idea of, you know, where they're located right now, as water's warm, we might be able to see like, are there range, you know, disappearing, are they getting, you know, kind of pushed further and further into the Arctic, which then might make, you know, harder access for other marine life that are going to be kind of continuing to push further into the Arctic. As you know, the waters get warmer and climate is changing. Just knowing, yeah, where they are is a big, I think, important key.
John Last 14:13
Ben Laurel,
Ben Laurel 14:14
I am hopeful that that is where this research is leading, and it's certainly we're just desperate for tools for Arctic observations, because we just don't have the ships in the water. We have very, you know, there's a couple borings, you know, there's potential to sort of put these hydrophones out and listen and, you know, those, those sort of applied tools, you know, using passive acoustics are certainly relevant many places, but I would argue probably more so even in the Arctic, just because we just don't have a lot of other ways of sampling fish, and it's dark, it's logistically hard to get to it's under ice. You can't use the same sort of traditional approaches to doing surveys. So we don't know when the fish spawn, we don't know where they spawn. We don't know in terms of migrations and pathways connectivity to different regions of the Arctic. So this would be a great tool if, if we could apply it, and I am hopeful that this can, this can lead to some, some sort of improvement in surveying these fish
John Last 15:29
with science it's not always the most satisfying story. There's always more work to be done, and that work can take years, even decades, to come to fruition. I wanted to ask Anneliese about this, having started from such a simple question and a simple discovery, this research project ballooned into a multinational, multi continental pursuit, a massive undertaking incorporating experts from Belgium, Canada, the United States and New Zealand, to name a few. After all this time, did she wish she bit off a little less to chew?
Amalis Reira 16:03
So from from the beginning of writing the grant, I remember thinking, Well, we do, we are a little bit ambitious with the project. We want to look at the physiology. We want to look at the like the the hearing ability, the acoustic part of it. We want a collaborator who's an expert in anatomy. We want a collaborator who's an expert in AI and machine learning, and none of these are anything that one single person could have all of that expertise together. So, you know, from the get go, we knew that we wanted a large team, or a large collaboration that was, you know, reaching international bounds. It wasn't all in house or even in continent. So that was exciting in a way. And then in practice, it was amazing that most of these collaborators agreed and were keen to join the team and to collaborate. And then in practicality, then you realize how challenging it is to incorporate the logistics. I think it was worth it to be ambitious. I think, I think it was worth it to be ambitious because then we can tell a fuller picture. I think it makes it more interesting and more complete, or or even it opens more doors.
John Last 17:21
It turns out, in a way, the Arctic cod research project may never really come to an end. At least, there will always be more questions to ask, more data to gather and interpret, and more answers to find. But armed with an auto detector, 1000s of hours of recordings and a glossary of common Arctic cod sounds. There's no end to what scientists like these can do. Amalis and I were ready to say goodbye to the Codcast. I learned a lot, but there was still one question I wanted to know the answer to, after studying cod for half a decade, could Amelie still look a cod filet in the face?
Amalis Reira 18:17
You know what? I don't know if I should be abashed about this or not, but I still will eat cod, its delicious.
John Last 18:27
I guess some things truly never change.
The Codcast is produced with the support of the North Pacific Research Board. Music was provided by Blue Dot sessions. The Arctic cod, of course, was recorded by Amalis. I produce this podcast. If you like it, tell your friends. You can read more about this project on the North Pacific Research Board website, www.nprb.org
